Reports of our death are an exaggeration: Difference between revisions

Reports of our death are an exaggeration (view source)

Revision as of 14:59, 15 January 2023

84 bytes removed , 15 January 2023

no edit summary

Amwelladmin

Bureaucrats, Interface administrators, Administrators

82,891

edits

@@ Line 116: / Line 116: @@
 We have fallen into some kind of modernist swoon, in which we hold up ourselves up against machines, as if ''techne'' is a platonic ideal to which we should aspire.
-So we set our children modernist criteria, too from the moment they set foot in the classroom. The [[education]] system selects for individuals who can be scored by reference to how well they obey rules, how reliably and quickly they can identify, analyse and resolve ''known'', precategorised, “problems”. But these are historical problems with known answers. This is a [[finite game]].  ''This is exactly what machines are best at''.
+So we set our children modernist criteria, too from the moment they set foot in the classroom. The [[education]] system selects for individuals by reference to how well they obey rules, how reliably, and quickly, they can identify, analyse and resolve ''known'', pre-categorised, “problems”. But these are historical problems with known answers. This is a [[finite game]]. ''This is exactly what machines are best at''.
 If we tell ourselves that “machine-like qualities” are the highest human aspiration, we will naturally find ourselves ''wanting''. We make it easy for the robots to take our jobs. We set ourselves up to fail.
-But human qualities are different — humans can improvise, imagine, narratise, analogise — they can conceptualise Platonic ideals — in a way that algorithms simply cannot.
+But human qualities are different — humans can improvise, imagine, narratise, analogise — they can conceptualise Platonic ideals — in a way that algorithms cannot.
 And there is the impish inconstancy, unreliability and unpredictability of the human condition — these make humans ''different'', not ''inferior'', to algorithms. They make us difficult to control and manage by algorithm.
-And that is the point. ''We are not to be making it easy for machines to manage and control us.'' By suppressing our human qualities, we make ourselves more legible, machine readable, triageable, categorisable by algorithm. The economies if scale and process efficiencies this yields do not accrue to us. They accrue to the machines and their owners.
+And that is the point. ''We are not meant to be making it easy for machines to manage and control us.'' By suppressing our human qualities, we make ourselves more legible, machine readable, triageable, categorisable by algorithm. The economies of scale and process efficiencies this yields accrue to the machines and their owners, not us.
 Why surrender before kick-off like that?
 ===A real challenger bank===
 Programmatisation has its place.
-They are the irreducible, ineffable, magic difference between excellent banks and hopeless ones: the transparent ''informal'' networks by which it mysteriously navigates all kinds of terrain like some hovering, morphing jellyfish. Sundar Pichai can’t code that. The same human expertise the banks need to hold their creaking systems together, to work around their bureaucratic absurdities and still sniff out new business opportunities and take a pragmatic and prudent view of the risk — this is not a bug in the system, but a feature. Neither Cryan nor Perez seems to think it exists.
+They are the irreducible, ineffable, magic difference between excellent banks and hopeless ones: the transparent ''informal'' networks by which it mysteriously navigates all kinds of terrain like some hovering, morphing jellyfish. Sundar Pichai can’t code that. The same human expertise the banks need to hold their creaking systems together, to work around their bureaucratic absurdities and still sniff out new business opportunities and take a pragmatic and prudent view of the risk — this is not a bug in the system, but a feature.
 Note how [[modernist]] this disposition is. The critique addresses only the formal, legible operational fame work. The chains of command. The [[silo]]es. The [[reporting line]]s. The [[dotted reporting line]]s.